The Woman Of Abu Ghraib

What happened to the women held at Abu Ghraib?

On the morning of September 24, 2003 -- five weeks after the suicide bombing of a United Nations compound in Baghdad killed 23 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, signaling an intensified phase of Iraqi insurgency -- a group of American soldiers burst into Selwa’s villa near the banks of the Tigris River in Samarra, Iraq. Samarra, at the time, was under siege; after the team burst in, one of the soldiers pointed his rifle at Selwa (she asked me to use a pseudonym), a 55-year-old wife and mother, and her daughters and grandchildren began screaming. She, and everyone in the villa, was terrified -- and with good reason. The soldiers had raided their house exactly four months earlier, and she remembered vividly what had happened that night.